Andrej "Babybay" Francisty is a jack-of-all-trades player who brings a considerable amount of firepower to the San Francisco Shock. At the end of the first stage, he ranked the highest in damage dealt within a 10-minute timeframe with 9,668 damage, edging out Hooreg of the London Spitfire, who posted 9,656 damage. Francisty has been a fun person to watch both in Overwatch League and on social media, where he started a movement called the Babybay Challenge. Every time someone takes on the Challenge, the Shock donate money to mental health organizations in the San Francisco area.

I talked to Francisty about this movement, his path into Overwatch League, and what we can expect from Stage 2, which begins on February 21. You can follow Francisty on Twitter and Instagram. Make sure you take the Challenge, and see if you can get your friends to keep the chain going.

Last week the fighting game community (FGC) watched as Joey “Mr. Wizard” Cuellar revealed the eight games which would comprise this year’s Evolution Championship Series (Evo) on a livestream. The announcement is big news; Evo is often the one time a year people outside the various FGCs tune into the fighting game scene. It’s also a marker of a game’s presence within the scene itself. If your game of choice makes it in, it’s likely there’s a healthy competitive scene for it.

But as Cuellar announced each game (you can find the full list here), he also made an announcement through omission: Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite would not make the cut, marking the first time in 18 years a game from the Marvel Vs. Capcom series would not be on the main lineup.

Fans immediately took to the livestream chat to ask why. The game being relatively new wasn’t an issue: Both Dragon Ball FighterZ and BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle made the cut, with the former having released less than a week before the announcement and the latter out this June. Instead, Cuellar pointed to a lack of competitive interest. “We know it was on a slippery slope and it had a lot of competition going forward ... and it just kind of fizzled,” Cuellar said on the livestream. “I don’t think people are playing it, and that’s the problem.”

Today, the developer launched the five-person team modes in Vainglory, raising the number of players per match from six to ten. Super Evil Megacorp held an event to celebrate this launch, showing off the game and inviting fans to watch competitive Vainglory live and in-person, which they did with enthusiasm. Chairs were set up facing a main screen projected on the wall, itself a collective mirroring screens from several phones dotted around the building. Fans were reacting to every twist and turn beamed onto the wall by banging together loud, hollow plastic tubes and screaming their heads off.

Up in the building's loft, Super Evil Megacorp's CEO Kristian Segerstrale was happily mingling among his employees. With a beer in hand, Segerstrale was happy to shake anyone else's hand, and encourage people to snack while they were there. A veteran executive of studios Supercell and Playfish, Segerstrale was oddly inviting, and started our interview asking me questions about Game Informer before I could ask any of my own.

Update: With the latest episode of The GI Show, we kicked off our GI Game Club discussion on Capcom's Monster Hunter: World. Six of us dove in deep on the gameplay, UI, and low rank hunts in the game. We hope you enjoy the discussion, and remember to send your thoughts on everything else in the game (high rank fights, elder dragons, fun stuff we didn't discuss this time around) to podcast@gameinformer.com. The next discussion will air on 2/15, so please send in your thoughts well before then.

Regardless, Kyle Hilliard and I do our best to explore the ambitious open-world RPG Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Along our merry travels we encounter a bare-footed vagabond, an accusatory weirdo, and whatever a dovecote is. We also talk about minor spoilers for the prologue of the game. Enjoy the video below!

Middle-earth: Shadow of War has been rolling out smaller patches and content drops at a slow but regular pace since the game’s launch back in September. But last week saw the first major expansion for the game finally arrive; Blade of Galadriel offers a new playable character with her own suite of special powers, and she fights her way through a dedicated campaign that moves the broader narrative forward.

I completed a thorough playthrough of the brief campaign in recent days, in the hopes of helping you decide if it’s worth your time – especially if you’ve already moved on to other gaming projects since the game’s launch window.

The short answer to whether you should play? Blade of Galadriel offers a few fun new twists on combat and the next step in the storyline, but it loses many of the system-based choices that helped the original game shine. This is an expansion for dedicated enthusiasts of the base game, eager for a chance to return to Mordor, but even they will miss the presence of important elements that defined the core release. Read below to understand what I mean.

Normally I'm a franchise player, but recently I've been diving deep into Ultimate Team and definitely enjoying the experience. This got me thinking: What franchise features could be used in Ultimate Team? Connected Franchise Mode's strengths (CFM) are its regular season/playoff/Super Bowl structure and offseason activity, while Madden Ultimate Team's allure (MUT) lies in opening packs to constantly refresh your roster. Surely there's a way to get the best of both these worlds together.

CFM fans shutter at the thought of MUT microtransactions invading CFM, but what I'm proposing is a mode within MUT that also allows both the existing structures of CFM and MUT to remain as they are. Instead, this would be a persistent online league, and everyone starts with a team built out of startup packs of weighted odds or uses the existing MUT Draft Champions feature.

Overwatch is at the height of its popularity, becoming Blizzard's fastest-growing franchise ever with more than 35 million players. The developer has also led the charge in promoting the game's burgeoning eSports scene with the Overwatch League, which boasted 10 million viewers during its first week of matches. It's incredible to think how a title mired in creative woes has become one of the videogame industry's largest cultural phenomena. Despite its rampant success and steady stream of quality content, I can't help but think how maps and characters won't be enough to sustain its overwhelming player base a few years down the line. How can Blizzard keep the payload moving? I created a list of ideas that not only include unique multiplayer modes, but also single-player ideas for Blizzard to keep in mind.

Blizzard vice president Jeff Kaplan has stated on multiple occasions that huge diversions from Overwatch's existing structure wouldn't be feasible to undertake, so with that in mind, my ideas are constructed around developing concurrent multiplayer maps, building upon existing kits with characters, and the like. Even then, with Overwatch's meteoric rise, I don't think it's unreasonable to imagine the studio expanding and/or splitting its team toward creating more diverse content to shake up the game.

Metro Exodus is making some big changes to 4A's formerly claustrophobic series (you can read all about them here!). The developer is also upping the ante visually, making one of the best looking video games look even better. We got the chance to go to the studio recently and see the game for ourselves and were blown away by how stunning the environments and particle effects looked. Don't take my word for it though: you can see for yourself down below with this bevy of exclusive screens. If you want to see a full-size version of them, just click on the screen below.

This is a shot of the open expanse from the spring area you travel to early on in the game. Referred to as "The Bridge" during our demo, we watched Artyom cross snow-covered plains to tangle with technology-wary cultists and mutants in order to lower a bridge so the Aurora, the train that Artyom and company are using to cross Russia, can continue its journey.

Before that section, however, Exodus begins with Artyom back in good old Moscow, doing what does best: fumbling through encounters with monsters and somehow surviving.

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Jun 7, 2017Updates and bug fixes OTW.

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Jun 7, 2017Updates and bug fixes OTW.

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